U lawyer raises new worry for light-rail line: segregation

Housing along the Central Corridor

The 12 planned and 15 existing housing developments along the Central Corridor Light Rail Transit line in St. Paul include market-rate condos and lofts (purple markers) and affordable senior and general occupancy affordable housing (green markers).

Light rail tracks continue their way down University Avenue in Minneapolis on Monday, October 8, 2012. (Pioneer Press: Ben Garvin)

Unlike many Twin Cities housing advocates, Myron Orfield doesn't fear the Central Corridor light-rail line will force low-income minorities from St. Paul neighborhoods. In fact, he's telling anyone who'll listen that it will do just the opposite.

Worried that light rail will raise nearby rents and home prices, advocates seek to create or preserve up to 4,500 units of "affordable" housing along the 11-mile route, much of it in St. Paul. Their plans have been endorsed by the city, the Central Corridor Funders Collaborative and other groups.

Orfield says he has good reason to go against the tide. A prominent housing scholar and civil rights lawyer at the University of Minnesota, he notes the corridor is already home to 11 percent of the metro's subsidized housing. And focusing affordable housing along urban transit lines, he adds, is to the detriment of low-income minorities.

"That intensifies racial segregation, and it doesn't give people any other choices in other neighborhoods," Orfield said. Programs are needed in the suburbs and other communities as well, he adds.

The Central Corridor will attract an estimated 17,000 new housing units over the next 20 years, according to Ann Mulholland, co-chair of the Central Corridor Funders Collaborative.

The Collaborative gathered a group of local officials to study housing along the rail line. Dubbed "The Big Picture Project," it set a goal that 20 percent should be affordable.

"The goal is 4,500 units of affordable housing. ...

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That's a mix of new, built or preserved. On top of that, the goal is to help 1,500 current residents stay in their homes," Mulholland said.

Orfield, director of the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota -- formerly known as the Institute on Race and Poverty -- was taken aback by those numbers. He worries that with so much public funding directed to housing along the transit line, little will be left for other areas.

And pushing lower-income residents to these new units along the corridor -- where schools tend to be lower performing, crime rates higher and health problems more prevalent -- does them no favors, he said.

As for the neighborhoods themselves: "It doesn't make them stronger to build more low-income housing," he said.

Tait Danielson-Castillo, director of the Frogtown Neighborhood Association, says pricier neighborhoods, such as areas around the University of St. Thomas, are working to limit the number of apartments, while housing advocates, the city's Housing and Redevelopment Authority and nonprofit organizations are funneling more into Frogtown.

"Frogtowners need more affordable housing," Danielson-Castillo said. "However, it doesn't all need to be in Frogtown. ... Anybody who talks about affordable housing always wants it in Frogtown. I rarely see these conversations happening in other parts of the city, downtown being the exception. We're not having a city conversation. We're constantly having a neighborhood conversation."

A MORE OPEN MARKET

The definition of "affordable housing" varies widely, from housing aimed at the very poor to housing targeted to moderate-income workers. For a rental project built with federal tax credits, the household income limit for a family of four in Ramsey County is $49,380, equal to 60 percent of the county's median household income.

Orfield found that from 2005 to 2011, the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency rejected $32 million in housing tax credit requests, about two-thirds of them for affordable-housing projects in predominantly white suburbs.

The willingness of those suburbs to accept affordable housing is rooted partly in the market for single-family homes drying up during the recession. The rental market is now stronger. Projects with a percentage of affordable units can qualify for low-income housing tax credits and public subsidy, helping to cement financing that might not otherwise be available.

"When the economy becomes strong, that will not be the case," said Orfield, who suspects suburbs will be less interested in affordable housing once credit markets loosen. "It makes sense not to waste this window of opportunity."

Orfield, a senior fellow at the liberal Brookings Institution and a former state lawmaker who became a consultant for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1994, said his concerns have mostly fallen on deaf ears.

Already this year, three campaigns have organized housing-related events along the corridor. The Twin Cities Local Initiatives Support Corp. (LISC) helped the Funders Collaborative assemble an "Affordable Housing Coordinated Plan," which the St. Paul City Council endorsed in December. The document is made up of policy recommendations and strategies to add or permanently preserve thousands of affordable units.

Andriana Abariotes, executive director of Twin Cities LISC, said those efforts range from housing for homeless youth to "workforce" housing that might be appropriate for bank tellers and retail workers. In downtown St. Paul, housing developments aimed at low- to mid-wage workers, such as the Minnesota Building and Renaissance Box, have sprung up near high-end housing such as the Lofts at Farmers Market and the Penfield, which is under construction. It's a healthy mix, she said.

"The Central Corridor is a very broad area," Abariotes said. "It's 11 miles long. It goes through two different cities, and it goes through two downtowns. There really is the potential to add and preserve affordable housing at a broad number of income levels, and it won't necessarily concentrate affordable housing as some of the critics said that it will."

CONCENTRATION VS. SPREADING OUT

Paul Williams has found good reason to focus affordable housing in neighborhoods that are already racially diverse. When 770 units of public housing, primarily in the Sumner-Olson and Glenwood-Lyndale housing developments on Minneapolis' near northside, were torn down to make room for mixed-income housing in the late 1990s, many residents of Southeast Asian descent were relocated to the suburbs with public assistance, said Williams, St. Paul's deputy mayor and a former vice president of LISC.

"They didn't find community out in those suburban, scattered areas," Williams said. "They found themselves coming back to connect with social services and family and to connect with their community."

During a recent conference on racial and ethnic economic inequality at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs, Williams said he rejects arguments for the "deconcentration" of affordable housing. As home values rise along the corridor, neighborhoods will increasingly rely upon developments that remain affordable in order to retain their minority populations, he said.

"Affordable housing in the core helps to build a strong community and later becomes a preservation strategy. ... I'm all for integration, but I'm just telling you, there's something about creating strong places that matters," Williams said.

The vision of affordable housing has changed, said Cecile Bedor, St. Paul's director of planning and economic development. Instead of the warehouse-style towers of the 1970s, new projects resemble Frogtown Square at University Avenue and Dale Street, which mixes several small businesses with residential units called Kings Crossing. Fresh development enhances neighborhoods that could use a boost.

"The idea is you would be able to drive by these projects and not know who lives there, because they look like market-rate apartment buildings," Bedor said.

Orfield is all for government having a strong role in building infrastructure, and he's all for affordable housing. But he thinks St. Paul -- especially the eastern-most neighborhoods along the light-rail line, such as Frogtown -- is quickly reaching its saturation point. The result, he says, is that low-income people, many of them black, are being segregated into corners of specific neighborhoods.

Already, the corridor is home to 3 percent of the metro's housing but 11 percent of its subsidized housing, he says.

That trend only serves to ensure minorities don't find a foothold in neighborhoods with better schools, more parks and other competitive public resources, he says. The result amounts to a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act, which aims to prevent the creation of modern ghettos, he says.

The St. Paul school district has just implemented a new plan to make the schools more neighborhood based, notes Jim Hilbert, a lawyer and executive director of the Center for Negotiation and Justice at William Mitchell Law School.

"Further segregation in housing will intensify segregation in the St. Paul schools," said Hilbert, who was a plaintiff attorney for an NAACP desegregation case in the mid-1990s focusing on Minneapolis. "So I worry that not only will this concentration of public housing limit opportunities for the housing residents, it will also likely further segregate St. Paul schools."

SHIFTING BALANCE

Many advocates say housing needs to transcend borders.

Megan Ryan, a spokeswoman for the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency, said the state's largest provider of tax credits and capital financing for affordable housing is committed to building in both cities and suburbs. The agency awarded $134 million to affordable housing efforts in October. That money will help create 3,100 units, about a fourth of them -- 802 units -- in the suburbs.

Orfield, however, points out that the ratio of funding used to be closer to 50/50, and before that, 70 percent of the agency's funding for affordable housing went to the suburbs.

"The average cost of a new unit on the Central Corridor is $225,000," Orfield said. "The average cost in the suburbs is $80,000 per unit."

Nevertheless, Paul Hagen, a spokesman with Episcopal Homes of Minnesota, a nonprofit provider of senior homes and services in St. Paul, said demand in the city is intense.

King's Crossing "was full with a waiting list the day it opened," Hagen said.

Hagen said that in the spring the organization will begin building a 50-unit senior residence called Midway Pointe, one of three developments that will be built on the site of the former Porky's drive-in on University between Fairview and Prior avenues. The 64-unit Terrace at Iris Park will offer market-rate senior units. A third building will be an extension of an existing nursing home.

"The needs for what we offer (are) much bigger than our ability to satisfy that need," Hagen said.